A Sheet Goods Phonebooth

The quiet space office phonebooth has become popular in open plan offices as a way of giving people a place to take and make phone calls without disturbing their cubicle neighbors. The first gen booths seem to take their cue from the old Bell Telephone phonebooths where you walk in, may or may not sit down, and walk out once you hang up.

VRT proposes to switch up the metaphor, to use the car rather than the phonebooth as the basis of design. At the same time rather than using a metal framework to which subsidiary components are attached, VRT proposes to fabricate the booth out of sheet goods easily assembled with cabinet RTA connectors.

In this way a booth can be fashioned out of approximately one hundred dollars worth of Birch plywood or even less with particleboard and maybe $50 worth of RTA connectors. A sheet goods strategy drastically reduces shipping weight as well, from over 600 lbs down to around 150 lbs. Finally emulating a car interior gives a way more ergonomic environment, feeling more like sitting comfortably at a desk than being awkwardly perched in a booth.

Below are two sets of drawings. The first shows the basic idea of the design, the second shows a strategy for fabrication using 3/4 Birch plywood and the Cabineo fasteners produced by the Swiss RTA manufacturer Lamello.